Your Outsourcing Questions Answered
Over the last few months I have been running teleconferences every fortnight for my students and I have accumulated a lot of common questions that gets asked regularly. It was very interesting to find out that it's not just my students that have these questions, but also many business owners around the world have asked these questions as well. How I know is I regularly check forums to see what is happening within outsourcing.
What I've created below is a video that goes for around 20 minutes and it answers a lot of the common questions and I even give away a lot of tips on how to leverage your Internet Business. So take a moment now to watch it:
Transcript:
Hi, Tyrone Shum here from MassOutsource.com. Welcome to this video! This video has been created so that I can help answer any of the questions that students and any people such as business owners from around the world have asked and a lot of the questions has to do with outsourcing and how to setup their business so that they can be outsourced to people over in the Philippines.
What I want to do now is go through and answer the most common questions that people wanted to have answered and also be able to give them guidance, some tips and also strategies on how to be able to outsource their business. This whole video presentation is for you to be able to benefit from and gain some knowledge and be able to get out there and start outsourcing your entire business. Hopefully with all the information that I provide here, you’ll be able to take away, get started and take action straightaway. So enjoy this, and just see how I’ll be answering a lot of these questions as well so it can benefit for you:
Where do I start?
This is a very common question and also very good question too. A lot of people who are just starting out and internet entrepreneurs wanting to run a business online and also those running the business for 6 months to 12 months plus are getting to the point where they say “I don’t know how to explain, how to grow and how to leverage business…” then basically you’ll want to look out outsourcing as the next level to be able to get your business running to where you want it to be. So where do we start with this?
The first thing I do is just to gain some experience exactly on how to go about outsourcing. I know you’re not going to get it right at the beginning and this is the reason why I’ve created this video for you and also to be able to answer these questions for you.
I know from experience when I first started to outsource a lot of work that I’m doing in my business, I struggled because I don’t know where to go, how to get the right people in place and also what systems to put in place and give them the right tasks to do. A lot of times I’ve been through and been ripped off as per sé and also not paid the correct price, a lot of times wasted as well. I don’t want you to go through that. I want you to fastrack your success to be able to achieve the goals that you want in your business.
Now, the first thing that we want to look at is getting some experience and also some knowledge. Let’s take step back – the most important thing that I believe in is Knowledge. Get some trained knowledge on how to go about doing it. What I would do is there are some free videos that I have in my MassOutsource.com website – 10 free videos on Where, How, and When to manage these people and a lot of these are towards hiring people from the Philippines. Go through and have a look on those videos just to be able to get started. It’s all absolutely free so there’s no strings attached.
Though, to gain experience, if you just have the knowledge and you don’t have experience, you wouldn’t be able to succeed in outsourcing your business. The first thing I would do is to either go out or find someone and hire them on a contract basis just to give them one project to start off with, learn to manage with them and learn to train them and see what they can do. Once you get that first trial over, and you know what to do from there then you can start to hire these people on a full time or part time basis.
How To Outsource Your Small Business In 5 Ways
You may probably ask yourself, “How can I outsource if I’m still starting up?” Well, there’s already the answer to that. The reason is when you are running a small business, you are the jack-of-all-trades where you play as the worker, manager and even the administrator all by yourself. Additionally, the more tasks you do on your own, the lesser it is to maintain the productivity of the work done and in effect, less efficient results to maintain greater profits in the near future.
Do Smart Business Owners Ask For Help?
Yes, they do and everyone should realize there would always reasons to seek help to expand expertise and opportunities. For me, I admit I’ve been through all the hassles of handling things by myself but since I have started outsourcing say, my Dragonboat business, I’ve had the best relief of having the chance to communicate with the suppliers and plan ahead of time to develop my Dragonboat service while my customer support staff stays responsible in answering queries, processing orders and payments as well.
If you’re thinking I’ve been spending too much as a start, no! Generally I’ve decided to outsource since it’s just a cheaper part of investment overseas while receiving a high quality of work in less time and effort. Now, let me show you how I’ve been able to realize that outsourcing while starting up really works:
What to Outsource?
Get to this mindset: Think of the things that you’ve done during the day and what actually gets done in the long run when you outsource it. I’ll draw an example to make this easy – emails for instance has always been part of your daily routines in the business and if you thought you have always checked on the new ones, then try to realize how your virtual staff can even filter, organize and respond to them in less time in daily basis. See? That’s a big break. Start to outsource anything that goes around a routine which cuts off at least 2 hours of your day administering to friends, customers and the likes.
When to Outsource?
There are just two things: when you know everything that has to be outsourced and when you know nothing about the tasks that you are currently outsourcing. As I said earlier, outsourcing can help you maximize the expertise in the business through the expanded efforts of your virtual staff all done at the same time. When you’re not good at graphic design for example, let an expert do that for you then it’s up for you to decide on a good, better and best outputs. Secondly, you can outsource the things in which you already are good at to give your virtual staff the right information and get things done the way you wanted. Also, checking on minimal errors on your part can be a lot easier than to implement the whole project yourself.
Why to Outsource?
It’s simply because you can do other things outside of your business but can think of more ways on how to increase profits as well. Outsourcing gives you enough time to plan, draw more targets and set better strategies for your earnings. Thus, the less work you do, the more it frees up your mind to activate your plans, grow profits easier and also enjoy the rest of your weekends.
Top 5 Tips On How To Outsource Your Business Whilst On Holidays
These last few weeks have been the most fun and productive times in my life. I just got back from a trip over to Hong Kong and Thailand and to share with you what I did, I’ve created a little video right below here that shows one of my most memory events whilst on holidays:
The reason why I show you this event is because when I look back over the time whilst I was away, not once did I check my email or have to worry about what was happening in my business. I literally left my laptop and mobile phone in Australia and I headed overseas and just had FUN! When I came back I was not surprised to only get 32 emails that were from my virtual staff and personal friends. Last time I traveled overseas when my business was not setup with the proper systems, I received easily over 200 emails in that same period of time. What a change it was!
How Did I Setup My Business To Allow Me To Be Stress Free Whilst On Holidays?
The key is outsourcing. I have a business that has core systems in place that allow full-time virtual staff to manage and run the business whether I am working or not. I spend a majority of my time creating video content which is the heart of my business and my members appreciate this. The rest of the work that still needs to be completed, such as customer billing, technical issues and marketing are all outsourced to people I hire from the Philippines. Though, even having full-time virtual staff working for me it is still vital to have proper systems in place. I am going to share with you the top 5 tips on how you can prepare your business to allow you to enjoy a stress free holiday:
Tip #1: Plan Ahead Of Time
Within my business, delivering video content is like running a TV show and if I want to ensure that my viewers receive what they paid for, then I need to follow a schedule. The best way to look at this is if you are writing content for a blog or uploading video to an online channel website, then you need to plan at the beginning and consider what you want to deliver to your market. As the saying goes, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Before I left for my holiday, I already had created over 8 videos which will be delivered over one and a half months. That way I am already prepared ahead of schedule. The same thing also applies to virtual staff and you will need to discuss with them the necessary work to be completed over the course of the year.
What Work To Give To Your Virtual Staff
Are You Batch Processing Your Outsourced Work?
Over the past couple years I’ve been very privileged to participate in Yaro Starak’s coaching programs and learn from his teachings. Recently I’ve been listening to his audio Mindset series in the car quite a number of times, not because I don’t have anything to listen to, it’s because I want to. What I have noticed every time I listen to this series is a new idea will come to mind and it keeps me grounded in how I should be approaching my Internet business.
A specific topic Yaro talked about is batch processing and it’s an important system for any Internet business. This topic wasn’t directed to outsourcing, though I wanted to share with you how relevant it can be.
What is Batch Processing?
Let’s take a look at an example in relation to emails. Emails are probably one of the biggest distractions in modern society (sorry guys, in my opinion it is), though they are necessary because it is considered a main form of communication between a client and a business. Now you can have the option of checking your email every hour of the day and replying to people answering their questions or you can batch process them at most once a day or twice a week (ultimately this is what you should strive to achieve). What batch processing does is it allows you to process all your tasks at one time rather than processing them as they come.
Rather than answer an email straight away, which takes 5 minutes to complete and interrupt your current task, you can process all your emails once at the end of the day, that allows you to have a focused effort. So you get the emails replied to in 30 minutes compared to the 50 minutes it would have taken you if spread these over the day.
In my Dragonboat business I let customers know that I personally check my email twice a week on Tuesday or Thursday and if the matter is urgent, they need to send the request to my support team who checks the ticket system twice a day on my behalf.
